English

DeCAP: Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation for Debiasing Zero-shot Question Answering in Large Language Models

Computation and Language 2025-03-26 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society

Abstract

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot Question Answering (QA), they tend to expose biases in their internal knowledge when faced with socially sensitive questions, leading to a degradation in performance. Existing zero-shot methods are efficient but fail to consider context and prevent bias propagation in the answers. To address this, we propose DeCAP, a method for debiasing LLMs using Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation. DeCAP leverages a Question Ambiguity Detection to take appropriate debiasing actions based on the context and a Neutral Answer Guidance Generation to suppress the LLMs make objective judgments about the context, minimizing the propagation of bias from their internal knowledge. Our various experiments across eight LLMs show that DeCAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot debiased QA performance. This demonstrates DeCAP's efficacy in enhancing the fairness and accuracy of LLMs in diverse QA settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.19426,
  title  = {DeCAP: Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation for Debiasing Zero-shot Question Answering in Large Language Models},
  author = {Suyoung Bae and YunSeok Choi and Jee-Hyong Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19426},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to NAACL 2025 main. 20 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:33:28.866Z